Upstate New York homeowners transformed a windswept hilltop into a naturalistic garden of luminous grasses and native flowers.

A hilltop may seem to be a wonderful place for a house, but such sites are usually treeless and exposed to direct sun and wind—scarcely ideal conditions for a garden. However, when Jack Hyland and Larry Wente found a glorious hilltop meadow with magnificent views over open fields in New York's Dutchess County, they were not deterred. Both of them are experienced gardeners, and while their house, designed by Wente, who is an architect, was still under construction, they visited several gardens and thought hard about what might work best in theirs.

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Wente was "tired of long, wide perennial borders," and Hyland was intrigued by the idea of primarily planting grasses and wildflowers. Both men wanted a garden intimately connected to the house.

"Our primary goal," Wente says, "was to make the inside and the outside feel part of the same experience."

When the work began in 2002, the first problem they addressed was the absence of trees on the property. This was solved by planting a grove of maples beyond the garden proper but directly in sight of the house as well as a 200-foot swath of spruce and white pine to act as a windbreak. A generous neighbor, disposing of an old tree farm, sold them 30 mature apple trees for a nominal sum, and these became an orchard.

The garden's main area is a long rectangular space that continues the footprint of the house and is divided into a series of narrow beds alternating with grassy paths. The beds are broken up into a number of sections, each with its own planting of a particular grass, among them dwarf fountain and big bluestem grass, Japanese blood grass and Shenandoah switch grass. The grasses are sometimes interspersed with such naturalist plants as alliums, lavender, nepeta, cosmos, verbena and rudbeckia.

The aim was to emphasize texture rather than color, and the loose waving and blowing of the grasses in the breeze gives the garden an almost luminous quality.

To be interesting, a garden needs strong vertical elements. Hyland and Wente used a long cedar pergola to continue the chief axis of the house. Planted with wisteria, it extends past the swimming pool, functioning not only as a protected covered walkway but also providing a dramatic contrast to the basically horizontal layout.

While the thrust of the garden closest to the house is linear, Hyland and Wente have cleverly chosen to do something entirely different with the main approach to the house. You arrive via a winding drive, bordered on the right by the apple orchard. Ahead is an enormous free-flowing bed filled with Deschampsia cespitosa 'Schottland' (Scottish tufted hair grass) and purple flowering verbena, which artfully frames the first full view of the stone-and-wood house. The effect is dramatic. By late August, further exuberance is provided by a smaller bed beyond the grasses, ablaze with goldenrod.

Although it is barely four years old, the garden already feels established and anchored. Hyland and Wente have done a masterful job of creating a strong elemental landscape, held together structurally and visually by clean geometric lines, interconnecting beds and a sophisticated choice of plant material.

"Taming the meadow" is how Hyland describes the making of this garden, and he is right. The former treeless windswept meadow has indeed been successfully tamed, and the result is a highly evocative marriage between architecture and nature.